


the corners of a triangle are where the lines kiss

by astrophrenia (closetplayground)



Category: Actor RPF
Genre: F/F, F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-27
Updated: 2012-07-27
Packaged: 2017-11-10 21:48:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/471066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/closetplayground/pseuds/astrophrenia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emma is infuriatingly good at figuring out what's on Jesse's mind, as usual.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the corners of a triangle are where the lines kiss

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Merrier the More, a Polyamory ficathon, which you can find [here.](http://cassiehayes.livejournal.com/40594.html#comments)
> 
> The prompt was this:
> 
> [Also jesse eisenberg/andrew garfield/emma stone _remember all the things that you and i did first, and now you're doing them with her?_](http://cassiehayes.livejournal.com/40594.html?thread=736146#t736146)

Jesse doesn't watch much in the way of TV, really. Or anything else, for that matter. He doesn't watch much in the way of anything that's been taped up and boxed in and stuck in a screen; as Andrew once teased, hitting it dead on as he often does (most often, on accident), he's a movie star who doesn't watch movies. Yet here he is, half scowling and half smiling at his computer, voices in his headphones that feel like they should be closer, gnawing his lip to the tune of an endless playlist of _The Amazing Spiderman_ cast interviews. 

He watches Andrew slip his hand around Emma's waist, then flit it back up to mess his hair, that ridiculous hair of his that makes Jesse smile when he's determined not to, and he watches Emma smile back like the sun is caught in Andrew's eyes, and he can't help but think that used to be us. The worst part is, he's not even sure anymore whether or not he's jealous of Emma, or of Andrew. Just which version exactly of 'us' is occupying all his stupid daydreams? Jesse thinks he will probably be the last to know for sure.

For a minute or two, in between interviews and bowls of instant ramen and bike rides, he thinks about calling them. One of them. Both. Either. It doesn't matter, he just wants to hear their voice (voices?) directed at him for real, instead of just the half-asleep, wistful way he pretends that he's every interviewer and every fan who asks whether Andrew wore underwear under his Spidey suit, or whether Emma is really a natural blonde. In the end, though, he never does. Jesse just stares at his phone, tapping around with his contact list and his speed dials nervously, and when he thinks he's finally close to making the call, any call, he gets up and checks on his cats again.

The worst part is, for most of Andrew and Emma's time in New York, Jesse wasn't there. He wonders if he hadn't been halfway across the planet if maybe his fingers wouldn't have become a rhythm section in their absence, tapping out little riffs of anxiety on every surface the apartment had to offer. 

He does call, eventually. It takes his therapist (both of them, actually), telling him in no uncertain terms that he absolutely has to do it before he actually does, but hey, whatever works. Besides, it's not like either of them are going to be unhappy to hear from him, right? Sure, they're all wrapped up in romance and spun up in stardom, but that never stopped either of them from being his friend before. Still, Jesse worries. Jesse always worries. 

Emma picks up, though it's actually Andrew's phone he's called, and Jesse smiles to himself at that, because what could be better, or worse, than getting through to both of them when he's not sure which he's trying to reach? 

“Jesse?” Emma says, barely pausing long enough for his brief 'Uh, yeah?' before she launches into an excited, “Oh my god, we were just talking about you, what a ridiculous coincidence, hey, Andrew, guess who's on the phone?”

Jesse can hear sarcasm and warmth in the background of the call, on top of restaurant sounds, and he swears he can actually see Andrew's sort of crooked smile when he says, “Is it the Queen? Because that woman will just not stop calling me.”

“Yes, Andrew, it's the Queen of England. You are the Queen, right?” Emma deadpans.

Jesse just grins. “I thought Helen Mirren was the Queen.”

“Drat, you're right,” Emma says, “and ten points for pop culture references, way to go Eisenberg. Anyway, we were definitely just talking about you.”

“Only bad things,” Andrew assures him, from somewhere to Emma's left.

“Yes,” Emma tells him, “terrible, horrible things. You are a truly reproachful man, and ought to be ashamed, and all that stuff. Actually, Andrew was just saying the last time he went to this restaurant was with you, and then we were sort of talking about shrimp cocktails and how we've all kissed by proxy in every possible way, and a little bit about how it's really stupid that we don't all hang out a little more when we're in the same freaking town.”

Jesse tries not to focus on the restaurant, or the kissing, tries not to try and figure out why they were talking about that, or what they might've said that Emma's not filling in, and tries not to try and figure out which restaurant, exactly, they're at. There's only a finite number he and Andrew went to in the city, and he's sure if he listened to the background of the call hard enough and -

“Hello?” Emma says, drawing out the second syllable to unreasonable lengths, like she's in a teen movie or something. “You think too much, it's probably unhealthy or something, hey, stop, I was not finished with that, nor did I say you could take it regardless.” She flows from the sentence that is for Jesse to the one for Andrew without pausing to change tone, or even stick in any major punctuation, and Jesse isn't sure if that's charming or annoying. He also isn't sure why he needs to pick? As the seconds count up higher on his phone, so does his assurance that this call was probably a bad plan.

Emma used to be the one he called when he was freaking out about Andrew, and now here he is, freaking out about... both of them, he guesses, and he has no one to call but them. He was never excellent at handling feelings head on, though, or at all, and he can't even figure out what his are doing at this point, so he just skips tact completely and blurts out, “I'd like you, uh, to see you, both of you?”

“Uh, yeah, sure, absolutely.” Emma's three affirmations concern him, but he tries not to dwell on it. “Like, now, or, what? I mean, we can come over after dinner. Right?” The question might be for him, or it might be for Andrew. Jesse waits for another answer, making sure he doesn't pounce on it, and get it all wrong. Andrew, for his part, seems to be thinking the same thing. In any case, there's a dead silence. “Ugh,” Emma groans, and Jesse can more or less hear her rolling her eyes over the line. “You two are impossible. Fine, yes, Andrew, Jesse, neither of you get a say in this. We'll be there in like an hour or so.”

Jesse smiles, feeling... honestly, he's not sure yet, so he'll get back to you on that one; somewhere between surprised, and relieved, or maybe between completely filled with dread, and elated. Either way, he has to change, because he is not seeing the two of them in a pair of, oh my god, are these Andrew's pants? These are definitely Andrew's pants. He should probably give them back, he thinks, but he doesn't want to. They are the world's most comfortable sweat pants. He'd forgotten why until just then, though.

\--- 

They've been there five minutes, and Jesse's already retreated to the kitchen under the guise of heating up water for tea, because he's almost completely sure that half the things Andrew says to Emma when there's no paparazzi to write them down were copied and pasted from the script he used with Jesse. It's like hanging out with your ex and their new girlfriend, only, him and Andrew were never really a couple, and Emma is one of the only people who ever knew that Jesse had ever wished that fact to be a fallacy. Jesse does not get the urge to kiss people very often, but he's drowning in it now, and so he burns his lips on a cup of boiling Earl Grey in the hopes it'll go away, but it only makes it hurt more acutely. He groans into the steaming porcelain, and wonders how normal people deal with situations like this. His internal monologue has become an even split of embarrassing teen novel meanderings, and Yiddish swear words, and he feels like smacking his head against every single hard surface in the hopes it will quiet it, but he has guests over, and even his cats would eye him funny for that sort of thing. 

He heads back into the living room, juggling three mugs of tea, and awkwardly slumps down into a sunken blue armchair, across from where Andrew and Emma are, curled into his dingy corduroy sofa, and curled into each other. Their cheeks are pink and their smiles are absolutely nauseating, and endearing, and a thousand other words Jesse doesn't have time enough to think just yet. 

They sort of small talk for a while, and Jesse is thankful for the easy topics they share, the ability to just fade into film talk, to babble on about working with Woody Allen and filming in Italy, and to sit and sip his tea carefully and pretend he's never heard their practiced anecdotes (with personal twists, for his company only) re: Spiderman. This goes on for so long, in fact, that he slips into an unconscious sort of comfort zone, and is caught completely off his guard when Emma asks out of the blue, “So, Eisenberg, have you ever fallen for a co-star?”

“Ellen is a nice girl, but I must dispel the rumours here and now, I'm sorry to say,” he replies, staring into his tea.

Emma rolls her eyes. “Well good, I'm glad you haven't fallen in love with Ellen Page, I'd have to get jealous, and then probably beat her up, and whatever nice girl she's dating might take that personally.”

“Jealous?” Jesse kicks himself internally, but it's already out.

“Duh,” Emma says, and he can't believe she's still going with this, because she knows, she absolutely knows, she knows everything he's ever been willing to say, and then some, because he's pretty sure there was more than one sad drunk dial from his phone to hers, so why is she doing this? There has to be some reason, and it's Emma, so it's probably a good one, but in the meantime, he kind of feels like he wants to become one with the armchair. “You have more than one costar, though. You've already heard our co-star dating escapades, heck, they're sitting right across from you. Spill it.”

“Seriously?”

Andrew is suspiciously quiet, especially for him; he's just sitting there, arm around Emma, mostly smiling at her, but sometimes smiling at Jesse, and generally just smiling, and nothing but. Jesse tries to come up with a word for like, three steps beyond suspicious, and settles on very suspicious, which is what Andrew is being. He starts tapping on his knee with one hand, and tries to figure out where this conversation is even headed. He fails.

“Yeah, seriously,” Emma replies. “I'm curious, and also talking about myself too much, so, it's your turn.”

Jesse fires back, “Why can't it be Andrew's turn?” and Andrew and Emma exchange the kind of smirking, knowing smile that only people seriously close can exchange, the kind Andrew used to give him. The littlest things make his heartstrings play stupid little songs that he hates.

For his part, Andrew's eyes twinkle so fiercely he might be a trickster god, and not a human being at all, and he just says, “Yeah, okay.”

Andrew actually counts off on his fingers, stupid grin on his face all the while as he lists them. “Robert, Carey, Emma, clearly. Oh, and Lily, uh, Heath, and... I feel like I'm forgetting someone really obvious.” Jesse can't help but feel really, really terrible as he listens and hears Andrew telling them that he's basically fallen for every single costar he's ever had, and that his name isn't on the list. He's so wrapped up in feeling terrible, in fact, that he doesn't notice Andrew get up.

“So,” Andrew says inquiringly as he heads off to put his empty mug in Jesse's kitchen like he's lived there all his life, “you really haven't ever fallen for a costar?”

Jesse swallows. “You guys are plotting something,” he accuses.

Emma throws her hands up in the air like a villain in a cartoon. “Oh no, Andrew, look, we're busted!” 

“You're both terrible,” Jesse remarks, setting his mug down on the coffee table, and frowns into his hands. He knows he's in love with Andrew. This has been true for some time, and he's grown to accept it and move on, because nothing will ever happen there that hasn't already run its course. He is emotionally incapable of expressing himself in the ways that Andrew feeds off of, and Emma is perfect for him anyway, and Jesse works better as a matched set of only one piece, anyway. If he says it enough times, maybe he will start believing that on-screen chemistry really is only on-screen, and he'll go back to the way things were. Not that that's possible, being as before Andrew, he had Anna, and before Anna, he had Anna, and before that, he didn't have anyone, and he doesn't really seem to know how to do adult life without one or the other at this point. 

Andrew comes back from the kitchen, and he stands in between the sofa and Jesse's armchair, holding an orange that he stole, and he smiles down at Jesse in the way he hasn't smiled at him in months, and Jesse swells up inside, with the heart that Andrew stole. 

“I admit it, we have a hidden agenda,” Emma drawls from the couch, “and that hidden agenda is that you are incredibly obtuse, and we're a little bit drunk, probably.”

“That is not a hidden agenda, those are just facts,” Jesse deadpans. 

Emma waves her hand at him dismissively. “Whatever, my point is, you are a giant mess of stupid feelings, and you will never, ever admit it unless I force you at metaphorical or possibly literal gunpoint.”

“I am not,” Jesse protests, “and I will not, and you do not have a gun of any sort, I hope. Anyway, I -” 

He gets cut off. “Ok, yes or no question: are you in love with my boyfriend, who is in fact, one of your costars?”

“You're ruining my life,” Jesse says, and Andrew is grinning like an idiot, and so is Emma, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that Jesse can do or say that will not turn this whole thing into the worst possible night of his life. 

“Objection, I'm not,” Emma shoots back. “Also, because I am a mind reader, and because you used to call me all the time and cry about this, I'll know if you're lying.”  
Jesse isn't sure how to respond to that. She has a point. Andrew doesn't seem to be upset about this, anyway, which is, nice? He's just sort of smiling, and Jesse is careful not to look at him too carefully, because if he catches that sun in his eyes, he might wind up getting blinded. 

“Ugh, fine, truth or dare, are you, or have you ever maybe fallen in love with your costar from a movie about Facebook?”

“The movie wasn't about Facebook,” Jesse fires back automatically, but he's grasping at threads. “It was about two people who were each other's world, who would do anything for each other, and how life broke them, and broke them apart. It was a love story between two guys who never realized they were in a love story until after the credits had rolled,” he says, and he's kind of babbling, and he's back in that place where he can just talk about Mark and Eduardo forever and at some point it blends and fades and becomes talking about him and Andrew and no one knows where one entity stops and the other starts, so he closes his mouth and shuts the words in.

Andrew's still smiling, infuriatingly, and Jesse figures, you know what, what the hell? 

“Yes,” he says finally. “Yes I am or have ever maybe fallen in love with one of my costars,” he turns to Emma and glares, ignoring Andrew with all the focus he can possibly manage, “why are you trying to ruin my life?”

“There's a reason people make sequels, you know,” Andrew says cryptically, still sort of standing in the middle of the conversation.

“What,” is all Jesse can manage. His brain has officially blown a circuit, possibly more than one. If this causes enduring psychological trauma, he's billing Emma for it. Andrew too. 

“You know, sequels? To finish up that story that we miss when those pesky credits come around.” Andrew takes two steps, closing the gap between his place on the carpet and Jesse's place in the chair, and Jesse just croaks out another, “What”, before Andrew is like, literally an inch from his face, and he says in this awful singsong, “Might that costar have been me?”

It's all Jesse can do to scowl and push him off, and make up all these excuses and, actually, you know what, fuck it? Who cares if Andrew and Emma are both drunk, or raving lunatics, or both, because Jesse's heart is in a thousand different places, and it's so loud, and his lips hurt with the burn and the need to touch something more than air, and Jesse does not really take a lot of risks, or go on many adventures, and his therapist said that might be good for him, so he just closes his eyes, and leans forward, and it's Andrew who does the real work for him.

Jesse might have kissed Andrew before, when both of them were really drunk, during filming. Never like this, though, he's sure he'd remember this. He's sure he's been kissed on the cheek, and on the hand, these mixed gestures of mocking and playful and maybe even genuine. Definitely genuine, he decides, considering the way Andrew is handling him now, both hands on his face, one sliding around the back of his neck now, pulling him into it, and Jesse wants to keep kissing him forever, but on the other hand, he might actually throw up. He is acutely aware of Andrew's breath on his skin, and his nails pressing into the back of his neck, and his mouth moving on Jesse's own like puzzle pieces or ocean waves, just as he is also acutely aware of Emma's kicked-back, smarmy, bemused presence on the sofa behind them, and he cannot decide whether kissing Andrew is better than Emma watching is mortifying. He decides not to focus on it, and instead focus on trying to figure out what Andrew is doing with his hands.

He lets go, eventually, sometime between one of Andrew's hands sliding up his shirt, undoing it, and Emma getting up and helping him get out of it. His heart is beating so fast now that he has stopped freaking out about what is happening to him, and started freaking out about maybe having a heart attack. He kisses Emma on accident, while his eyes are closed, and he recognizes her lips, and their very un-Andrew-ness, and he's okay with that. He keeps kissing her while he feels Andrew's sardonic grin pressed against his hip bones, and his whole body is just shivering all over, like a drug addict, or an epileptic, or something decidedly more positive than either. 

Andrew is undoing his jeans and Emma is playing with his hair and he snaps back to reality and emerges from the tangle of lips and hands to half-shout out a third breathy, “What,” but he doesn't really feel the need to ask. It's so alien, but it feels so comfortable, at least, until Emma's teeth close on his lower lip, and he jumps, and they both laugh at him, and then it's comfortable again. He's a blur of confused thoughts and certain ones, and he's not sure whether he's more surprised that he's making out in an arm chair with Andrew, who he's wanted for ages now, or with Emma, who he never did to begin with, but either way, both feel just resoundingly right. 

Jesse lets out an undignified squeak as Andrew brushes a hand over his crotch, and it hits him like a flash flood that he is probably going to wind up having sex with two of his best friends, at the same time, and oh my god, he has no idea how threesomes work, holy shit is this a threesome, this is definitely a threesome, isn't it, there are definitely three of them, and there sure is... some. He wants to voice a complaint about this, some sort of 'Uh, guys, can I read the manual before you debauch me on my living room furniture, I have no idea what I'm doing?', but he can only manage a somewhat strangled, “Is this really going to happen on an armchair?”

“Uh,” Emma says, pulling away from where her lips were, on Andrew's bare shoulder, “I guess that might be tricky, logistically speaking. I'm sort of falling off in every direction already.”

Andrew mumbles out, “Bedroom?” and gets up like clockwork, nearly knocking Emma over, like he's memorized the steps between Jesse's living room, and Jesse's bed, which, well, maybe he has. Jesse nods, and they all sort of pry themselves free of the sunken clutches of the armchair.

They make it about halfway before Emma pins Jesse against the wall in the hallway, and peppers his neck and shoulders with these short, sharp little kisses that are more teeth than lips, which startled him at first, but are just, wow, at this point. Andrew drags them both away from the wall after a minute, and somehow manages to push both of them down on Jesse's bed simultaneously, and Jesse is just completely overwhelmed. Four hours ago, he was watching videos of Andrew and Emma staring lovelorn into each other's eyes on YouTube, and now he's watching Emma unhook her bra and Andrew take off his socks, and it's the weirdest mix of really sexy and really stupid he's ever experienced, and basically, he's pretty sure he knocked his head in the kitchen and concussed himself or something, because there's no way this is really happening to him.

Andrew puts a hand on Jesse's hand, his fingers spread out over the bedsheets, and it's so tender for about five seconds, and then his fingers close around Jesse's wrist, and it's something beyond tenderness that Jesse hasn't even dared fantasize about in probably years. Emma slides between them, stripped down to just her underwear, which are distractingly red, and Jesse feels hot all over, and a little bit like he's having trouble breathing. Her mouth is on his collarbone, and Andrew's hand, the one not pinning Jesse to the mattress, is on Emma's lower back, tracing little red lines into her skin, and Jesse has never felt so overwhelmed by need, his, Andrew's, and Emma's, all together, in his entire life. This is the kind of thing that middle aged ladies read about on airplanes and cross their legs over, he thinks, and then instantly regrets having that thought, because wow, totally not sexy, but Emma bites down on his skin, hard, and he forgets all about it. 

Jesse closes his eyes and presses his lips up and against Emma's torso, just below her breasts, where he can feel her breath heaving in her lungs, like she's breathing just for him. She smells like soap, and lilacs, and a little bit like sweat, and at that moment, it's probably the second or third sexiest thing he's ever experienced, at least until the next thing comes along. His mouth is moving up her body like a train on a track, like he couldn't change direction if he tried, if he wanted to, which he doesn't. Sex, and all the things that lead into it, much like the rest of life, except maybe acting, is an endless series of awkward surprises for Jesse; he kind of feels like he's just falling into things, falling into touches, and kisses, and falling into love in ways he couldn't fathom five hours ago. 

The hand on his wrist shifts, and Andrew is pressed up against him, his body breaking on Jesse's like a wave on the shore, and as Emma works down his body and he loses track of her's, Andrew moves up, until their lips are locked together again, and Jesse gasps for air that he doesn't really want. His head is a mess of heartbeats and adrenaline, and a thousand other fancy brain chemicals he can't even think of the names of right now. He kisses Andrew back, hard and soft at once, throwing a little Emma flair into it and biting his lips, testing the waters. Andrew is a windstorm in bed, a thousand blustering places at once, his hands touching Emma and Jesse everywhere they can be touched, his tongue doing things to Jesse's that Jesse frankly thinks ought to be illegal. 

He gets a little more confident, bit by bit, and it helps that Emma's has her teeth and her tongue and her lips all over his stomach, and hips, and oh, god, wow, yes. Jesse twitches slightly at Emma's touches, and as she slips her fingertips over the band of his underwear he kisses off Andrew's mouth, shifting and sucking and biting all down his neck, and Andrew just groans ever so slightly. Andrew is smiling like an idiot, and Emma is smiling with this look of complete almost vicious satisfaction, like she just fought a war and won, and in a way she did, and Jesse pulls his lips off Andrew's skin just long enough to mumble out an earnest, “I love you,” to neither one of them in particular, to both of them.

Emma tugs his underwear down and Jesse puts all his energy in anything but how hard he is, because if he even looks down he might completely lose it, so he just slides his mouth back to Andrew's, and kisses him like the world is ending. Jesse has never done this before, any part of this, and so he just closes his eyes and lets what instinct he have take over. Emma is tracing circles on his abdomen with her fingertips, and Jesse's breathing is so staggering that for a moment he forgets where he is and just slips into freak out mode, because this kind of, well, panting, can't be normal, can't be good, can't be, _oh_. His fingers tighten and grasp, one clawing against Emma's skin, the sharp of her shoulder blade under his touch anchoring him in reality, the other hand curling into the bedsheets between his body and Andrew's. He forgets to worry about his heart rate, and it races on without his concern. 

He gets lost in the sensation of it all, drowning in every touch and kiss, swept out to sea on the sneaker waves of Emma's tongue tracing a line down his stomach, and Andrew's hands pulling his hair too tight. Jesse ceases to be able to tell where any of them start or stop, and even though he hits his head on the wall at least twice, and Andrew falls off the bed at one point, and once he bucks his hips up in this stupid involuntary twitch that knocks Emma sideways and sends them all into a brief exchange of laughter, even with all of that, he feels, for perhaps the first time in his life, absolutely graceful. Every time before this, in the brief instances when he's considered things like this, three people moving so close against each other, he could never figure out how anyone made it work, but they just do, and it's effortless, and it's ridiculous, and every time his fingers reach out and scrape the plaster at his headboard, he swears it feels just like the gates of Heaven. 

They become a whirlwind of shifting humanity, twisting and turning, and Jesse finds himself on top, and then just as soon, on the bottom again, or moving in at the sides, and it all feels natural, and he keeps laughing in this weird blend of pleasure and surprise, which Emma and Andrew learn quickly is a good thing, however strange it sounds. Jesse's never done this before, never done anything like this before. He spends most nights with his cats and his books, and he collects outdated maps instead of phone numbers he'd never have the courage to call. Of all the people in the world, he would have pegged himself as the least likely to find himself in this position, any of these positions, really, yet here he is. Part of him hopes this never ends, or if it does, it never stops happening, but part of him is sure he'd never get that lucky. He's straying further into these thoughts when Andrew catches the somewhat fallen expression on his face, and kisses him, long and soft, one hand cupping Jesse's cheek, and Jesse knows he doesn't have anything to worry about anymore, so he doesn't. For once, Jesse doesn't worry about anything. He feels remarkably alive.


End file.
